Abun-dance

After a flurry of activities, compressed into a three day week full of meetings, inbox assaults, deadlines met and not met, I activated my out-of-the-office message for Friday and headed out to Marlborough for the third and last 30 hour face-to-face workshop in my coaching training that is nearing its end. Not counting the time spent writing reports and filling in worksheets and reading required books, this will complete 200 hours of study. It seemed daunting at the time I started back in February, and it is still a little daunting since there is an exam still to be taking, but I do feel a sense of accomplishments and feeling tremendously enriched.

We learned some new techniques today and I applied one to the question whether I wanted to be a vegetarian or a mixed animal/vegetable eater. The tool probes for pain and gain (or costs and benefits) of change versus status quo. The answer was quite clear at the end of the exercise: I will remain a combo eater, light on the animal side but not without. This turned out to be a good choice: I was invited along to dine in a Brazilian diner where, had I made the other choice, I would not have been able to eat.

Back at home Fall is approaching. Tonight Axel had a fire going again, barely three months after the last spring fire in June. Our summers are short indeed, but our apres-summer is one of the best seasons of the year.

The vegetable garden is full and ripe. I pulled up the leek and braised them as suggested by Julia Child; the last fingerlings were consumed tonight by Axel – we have been eating those for weeks now. The beans keep producing as if there is no tomorrow and the kale keeps coming back after we cut it bare. The Sungold cherrie tomatoes also keep producing but their skins are more and more fragile and burst before we can even get to them – burst or not burst, they are still delicious. We are in a state of vegetal abundance.

And in the cove there is marine abundance. With a little bit of luck we will be able to harvest oysters in the not too distant future; the mussels are indeed reproducing, and the sea urchins are coming back. We have been a bit lax with the lobster traps, leaving them baitless in the waters where they fill up with the red invasive seaweed, an abundance we are less happy about.